EXCERPTS: The Department of Energy’s official line – echoed by many environmental activists and academics – is that the vast array of solar panels and wind turbines required to meet Biden’s goal of “100% clean electricity” by 2035 will require “less than one-half of one percent of the contiguous U.S. land area.” This top line number translates into 15,000 of the lower 48’s roughly 3 million square miles.
However,the government report that furnished those estimates also notes that the wind farm footprint alone could require an expanse nine times as large: 134,000 square miles. Even that figure is misleading because it does not include land for the new transmission systems that would connect the energy, created by the solar panels carpeting the ground and skyscraper-tall wind turbines filling the horizons, to American businesses and homes.
Not counted: space for new high-voltage transmission lines, key to utility-scale solar and wind projects.Solar Energy Industries Association hundreds of thousands of acres if not millions for transmissions alone, said David Blackmon, an energy consultant and writer based in Texas. The wind and solar farms will take enormous swaths of land all over the country and no one is talking about that.
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